Some queries and suggestions about bug reporting for PO files

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

Hi everybody :)

I've just come up for air after some long sessions in HEAD PO files,  
and reported a _stack_ of typos etc. at Bugzilla, and that's given  
rise to some irritation, um, constructive suggestions in my mind. ;)

1. Is the title of the PO file actually the name of the program as  
listed in the Bugzilla "pick a Gnome program" list? For example, I  
can't find a listing for "uf-view" or "contact-lookup-applet".

2. If we are going to continue using Bugzilla for problems with PO  
files, could we please ask each developer to choose the component  
"general" for his or her program? When reporting typos or problems  
with the PO file, being given the choice between "applet" and "dÃmon"  
is not useful.

3. In fact, could we have a component named "PO file" or  
"translation", thus alerting the developer from the beginning to what  
kind of report it is? Bugzilla is largely if not completely set up  
for reports of difficulties _running_ a program, not with translating  
its PO file. Having our own category would help both us and the  
developers. It would help especially for Gnome Bug-Squashing Parties,  
and Gnome Love Days, where translators could concentrate on bugs  
reported under our category, if we wished, and achieve (even ;) )  
more. Perhaps the i18n and l10n tags do this already, but I still  
think it would help.

4. Where do we report bugs against the Gnome online interface itself?  
For example, I have had some problems with the Gnome Live site, which  
uses the moinmoin wiki software (which really doesn't compare with  
wikimedia, dokuwiki or pmwiki for UTF-8 support and intuitiuve and  
readable display, but I gather we're stuck with it :( ), some of  
which brought up error messages, and I don't know where to report them.

5. I reported the typo "occured" against four separate programs' PO  
files today, and that's only _today's_ bug-reporting. This typo is a  
disease at Gnome. Do we have any hope of immunizing our PO-file  
developers? I thought it was a recent or isolated problem, when I  
first encountered this typo in a few files, but it just keeps on  
happening, and I've noticed at least one other translator saying he  
has been trying to change this for some time. Is there, in fact, a  
more efficient way to address a wide-spread type of error, other than  
reporting it individually, again and again, against each and every PO  
file which contains it?

6. I would really like to make some sort of effective effort towards  
increasing developers' awareness of the need for context. For  
example, this string:

msgstr "by {0}"

No comment, no context, no nearby strings that appear to have any  
connection with it at all. Good grief!

I reported this as a query, but I think we have to do far too much  
guesswork while translating. How can we improve the situation? Is  
there anything constructive and positive we can do?

7. This next one isn't really a bug-reporting issue, but I'll add it  
here if that's OK. I recently discovered the Gnome glossary for my  
language, in gnome-i18n/glossary/ . I had no idea it was there.

I had wondered why some of msgmerge's guesses in files I'd downloaded  
for the first time were quite good, and others were way out, still  
others entries which I had to complete repeatedly in different files.  
Is the existence of the glossaries already part of our introductory  
material? I have updated the glossary file for my language, and I  
know it's going to save me a lot of repetitive work. I just wish I'd  
known about it before.

8. On the subject of repetitive work, I don't know much, if anything,  
about the way Gnome system resources work, but do we really have to  
translate things like "Orientation", "Orientation of the Tray",  
"File", "Edit", "Print" and other extremely common if not ubiquitous  
strings again and again in PO files? Is there a shared resource, that  
works like a GConf or glade file in some way, or as the iso-codes  
files should be used? Could we create a plugin that supplied these  
extremely common strings, so they only had to be translated once for  
each language? (I hope these suggestions aren't completely weird...â

My manic, um, tidy personality insists I create points 9 and 10 for  
decimal symmetry, but I'll leave it there, and ask very seriously for  
the benefit of your experience and wisdom on these topics. I would  
really like to see these issues improved, and I'd be willing to put  
time into them, but I don't know where to start.

Thankyou very much for reading this, and for any help you can offer. :)

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhÃm  
Viát hÃa phán mám tá do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN